


On a Souq

by SrebrnaFH



Series: Srebrna's Sherlock Oneshots [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bearded John Watson, Faked Suicide, John Has a Beard, M/M, Post-Season/Series 03 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-05 23:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15873582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SrebrnaFH/pseuds/SrebrnaFH
Summary: Sherlock goes on a mission for Mycroft and meets a merchant he was directed to find.





	On a Souq

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [http://inevitably-johnlocked.tumblr.com/post/177652794988/petition-to-make-john-have-the-scruffy-scruff-like ](http://inevitably-johnlocked.tumblr.com/post/177652794988/petition-to-make-john-have-the-scruffy-scruff-like):
> 
>  
> 
> _Petition to make John have the scruffy scruff like he did in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. I long to see him look at Sherlock and said, “I know you don’t like the mustache, but piss off.” And Sherlock just retreat into his mind palace thinking of how it would feel on his neck, cheeks, thighs, arse, etc, then for him to come back and cough shyly and say, “T-this one is alright..”_

It is unbearably hot and the way the market is set up is  _illogical_. He knows he has to find the one trader that sells bronze and copper jewellery and sits between a woman who deals with teas and a family of spice merchants. He know that much perfectly. Unfortunately for his endeavour, there are many combinations of these elements, yet always there is something wrong about them. Either the family is too big, or too small, or selling rice, or the woman is too old or actually a boy in disguise. Or the jewellery merchant is actually selling small cakes of dye.

He had been at that since the early morning and had tried to ingest as much of information about that place as possible, but it seems the temperature, the  _humanity_  around him is hell bent on making it impossible for him to complete the assignment.

He spins in place, the loose coarse garments he is wearing making for an additional irritant - he wants his shirt and trousers back, even if it means baking alive under the Egyptian sun.

Mycroft and his ideas.

He scoffs.

Mycroft finding him make-believe missions to take his mind off the fact that his best friend had, as far as the general public knows, committed a suicide (after finding out the truth of his very much fake wife and her equally fake pregnancy).

Mycroft is an idiot if he thinks Sherlock hadn’t seen through the ruse.

 _Both_  of the ruses, actually.

It’s obvious John Watson is alive, somewhere, and Mycroft knows about it. Sherlock had guessed the moment he had been knocked down and transported to a hospital under the guise of “nervous breakdown”. What he doesn’t know is  _why._  Why would his best friend (flatmate, blogger, business partner) choose to leave him like that and, adding insult to injury, ask his  _brother_  for help, not him.

He twirls, looking around at the next crossing of little alleys.

And suddenly, there they are.

A family. A lone merchant. A woman.

The man’s head is bowed low over the tray of his handmade pendants, blues and browns of the glass inserts glinting in the harsh sun.

Sherlock feels the trickles of sweat on his back, under the too-wide and too-thick shirt he had been forced to wear and his strides lengthen as he approaches the right spot.

First he buys a packet of whole green pepper from the family.

Then he asks the woman for a lemon and ginger concoction for sore throat.

Then he goes back to the spice merchants for ground ginger.

Finally, he sits down in the provided spot in front of the hooded figure manning the jewellery stand. Stand being too big of a word - it’s not even a table, it’s just some patterned piece of cloth and three rows of shining little metal discs arranged on it.

The man gestures, quickly withdrawing the hand back into the voluminous sleeves of his robes. He cocks his head a bit to the left, as if inviting Sherlock to talk. A bit of a scruffy beard - a reddish beard, actually - peeks from und…

A reddish beard. Yes, he knows, he shouldn’t be using the stereotypes, but the stereotypes are what his work is based on and they had rarely let him down before. By all accounts, there should be no redheads of any kind around here - the local sun is rather bad for them (hell, it is bad for him) - and so nobody should be walking around sporting a beard of that colour.

He reaches out and with just one tentative finger pushes up the hood. Up, up and back, back, and letting it slide over the silver-shot blonde hair and allowing it to fall to the tense shoulders of a shorter man sitting cross-legged in front of him.

He sucks in a breath that is more of a moan than anything else.

John chews on his cheek for a moment and then purses his lips in an immediately defiant fashion.

“I know you didn’t like the moustache, but piss off” and his voice is gruffy and somehow gritty and bears the traces of all the other languages John had used since he had last the chance to speak proper Queen’s English.

He reaches out to touch the apparition in front of him, but then retracts the hand as he remembers where they are and who they are.

He looks down at the medallions, all of them patterned with some kind of flower motif and swallows, retreating just for a small fortifying moment into his own mind. He longs to feel the skin and the hair and the movement of air as John breathes. He wants to touch, to hold, to hug, to rub at the newness of that well-known face, to pull John closer and feel the roughness of that beard as it brushes against his hands, his neck, his… his everything. He wonders for a moment how it would be to have beard burns in places he had never considered very erotic and suddenly all of them become rather very erotic, thank you. All of the ones he  _had_  considered are now aflame, pushing him to experiment, to find out, to quantify and catalogue all the sensations he could…

He swallows and looks up, straight into John’s eyes.

“T-this one is alright” he manages to utter without succumbing to the lisp that was threatening to betray how exactly far he had gone into his fantasies.

Judging by John’s suddenly breaking out grin, it hadn’t exactly been a successful attempt nevertheless.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is like totally nowhere specific and at no specific time, apart from being "after Season 3".


End file.
